Portraits à Paris

“What are you looking at?”
“I’m looking over at the law court. They put you in jail for no reason now.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I sent a letter to the prosecutor, telling her what I really think about French president François Hollande. I’ve been condemned for what I wrote. There isn’t any more freedom of speech here, and this is supposed to be the country of human rights.”
“You think the situation’s really deteriorating?”
“Yes I do. And I know what I’m talking about because I was raised in the Soviet Union. I was enrolled in the Red Army. In 1985, I was in Ukraine, and that was especially hard.”
“Were you forced to enroll in the Red Army?”
“Yes, more or less. It was the same for most people there. No one really trusted the communist ideal, and no one was a communist. Those feelings developed a few years before the collapse of the USSR. The communist dream had already disappeared. It was just a matter of time.”
“Were you happy when it finally collapsed in 1991?”
“I was euphoric, as was everybody. But I was quickly disillusioned soon after that. The current system, Putin’s, is actually much worse than communism. It’s a kind of dictatorship in Russia these days.”
“Why don’t people challenge that power, like in Berlin in 1989?”
“Russian people don’t yet have a spirit of union. But they’ll get it, and their revolt will be violent, as it was during the fall of the USSR.”
“Coming back to France, do you think that kind of revolution is called for to get liberties back here?”
“There’s a Slavic proverb that says: ‘What is good for a Russian can be fatal for a Frenchman.’ So maybe we should think of another alternative for France.”

She didn’t stop walking and didn’t say anything. She just posed. But there was enough to say, especially about her hoodie. You may read « ALLEZ CHIRAC! » (And there’s also, at the bottom, « ALLEZ LA FRANCE! »), which means « Go Chirac! Go France! ». Chirac was a former French president from 1995 to 2007, and you can learn more about him there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Chirac